Wednesday, August 05, 2015

Here's an addition to my MAPS series. Watercolor over a map of Colorado.

I love sitting at the window whenever I fly home to Arkansas via Dallas because the land below is so interesting. As one crosses the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains farmlands appear, dotted with thousands of irrigation crop circles. Some farms have many of these circle irrigation rigs and where the land is flat whole circles of irrigated land is painted onto the landscape. But in places only a portion of the circle is watered because of land features and farm holding borders. Here's a link to a photograph of these amazing circles.

It's sure interesting, and I've drawn them many times but this is the first time I've ventured to paint the idea of land and crops and boundaries. Of course this isn't exactly what I saw; it's a painting of the idea of circles irrigation and how it changes the land.

The left portion of the painting is watercolor paper and I covered the map area with pastel ground so it will accept the watercolor better. The lines are drawn with sumi ink and watercolor pencil and then misted with water to blur the boundaries, then sealed with acrylic medium and wax.Thanks to Jill Berry for the technique which she calls "Geo Papers". Jill has written a couple of books about using maps for making art. Visit her website by clicking here:

Monday, August 03, 2015

After several weeks away from my studio I'm back at work on some new collages and paintings in preparation for the Portland Open Studios Tour and the Washington County Studio Tour in October. While the tour is meant to be educational in nature I want to have lots of new work on my walls.It's been hotter and drier here in Portland than I can remember in my 50-plus years as an Oregon resident. Not only is the grass brown but shrubs and trees are dying from the prolonged abnormal temperatures. Perhaps longing for rain is what drove me to think about rainforests and plentiful water, orange ponchos, and trudging along forest trails.Here's RainForest, collage on board, 12x12".

Art Tip: Removing acrylic from hands

Use ordinary hand sanitizer to quickly remove acrylic paint and medium from your hands. The alcohol in the sanitizer dissolves the acrylic. Wipe well with a paper towel and then wash with soap and water.

Art Tip: brush cleaning

As I work with acrylic medium for glue or with acrylic paints I stand my brushes in a bucket of water on my work table and give them a soap and water cleanup every day or so. But eventually my brushes get gunky and sometimes I forget to clean them. That's when I clean them with Murphy's Oil Soap. I keep an inch of MOS mixed 1:1 with water in a tall plastic tub (Feta from Costco) and put caked brushes in that solution overnight. By the next day the soap has softened the brush and with a bit of elbow grease I can get the brushes back to useable. This also works for brushes used with oil paint. I gave up using oils but wanted to save those good brushes and Murphy's Oil Soap came to the rescue. Get it at the grocery store.